


a river to the sea

by thescrewtapedemos



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Bloodborne Fusion, Body Horror, Cannibalism, Eye Trauma, M/M, Psychological Horror, a couple hits of a machine for pigs as well for shits and giggles, playing absolute havoc with dunwall geography, referenced child death (not emily)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-08
Updated: 2018-05-08
Packaged: 2019-05-03 22:25:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14578941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thescrewtapedemos/pseuds/thescrewtapedemos
Summary: The room shakes for a moment. It had struck the wall. Corvo grits his teeth against the frustration.Come and get me, you bastard,he thinks viciously. He's not ready, never was ready to die but he doesn't want to wait for it, doesn't want to linger in this closet that reeks of mildew.





	a river to the sea

**Author's Note:**

> mind the tags, please. thanks to moliver for basically thrashing this out at 1 am you absolute ledge
> 
> enjoy xoxo

“Eventually,” the doll tells him, “all things must reach a balance.”

* * *

The beast screams triumphantly on the other side of the closet door. A rattling, choking scream of starvation and triumph. There’s blood on that scream. 

Corvo squeezes his eyes shut and presses himself farther back among the mouldering clothes. Out of bullets, out of knives. Out of time as well. Nothing in this dainty, rotting child's closet to use as a weapon. 

The thing screams again and there's the sound of wood breaking, a table or a bed frame. Long, ragged nails against porcelain tiles coming in his direction. It’s toying with him, he knows that much. It knows where he is. 

Corvo had seen it before it had trapped him in here. Not so far gone as some; it's mouth opening a little too wide, eyes sunken and filmy, nails yellow and ragged and far too long. Something entirely unpleasantly wrong with the bones of what had been a woman’s face, but still recognizable. Still lethal. 

The room shakes for a moment. It had struck the wall. Corvo grits his teeth against the frustration. 

_Come and get me, you bastard,_ he thinks viciously. He's not ready, never was ready to die but he doesn't want to wait for it, doesn't want to linger in this closet that reeks of mildew. 

Another crash, but farther away, and then a curious snarl rising into a shriek of rage from the thing outside. Corvo frowns, and he's moving to peek through the crack in the door when the shriek cuts off into a wet, coughing gurgle. 

For a moment there is quiet, and Corvo feels fear break through the blind anger for the first time since his gun had clicked empty. 

Something small and quiet moves in the room beyond the closet door. 

He looks young and starving and sick, the man that opens the closet door, and there's a long knife in his free hand dripping black blood on the dirty floor. He smiles when he sees Corvo, a smile that changes his entire face. 

_Oh,_ Corvo thinks dizzily, a shattered little thought, _oh, it's you._

“You need to be more careful, Corvo,” the man scolds quietly and reaches out to scoop Corvo free of the rotting clothes. 

The man doesn't let him go, drags him in closer and Corvo lets it happen. He smells like sweat and river water and Corvo tucks his nose against the crook of his neck and breathes in greedily. The man doesn't complain at the way Corvo’s hands must be way too tight digging into the small of his back. He holds on just as tight. 

Their bodies fit together like they know each other and Corvo breathes in a smell that's so familiar it aches in his chest.

* * *

Rooftops are safest. He likes rooftops and high places, the intricate struts bracing crumbling buildings, the omnipresent ductwork. When they built Dunwall it feels like they must have built it for him.

The streets hem him in, narrow his range of motion, keep his peripherals tight. Harder to swing a knife, more difficult to get off a shot with close range making it impossible to take the time to aim. More difficult to hide, to work out the wandering paths of the beasts. Easier to be trapped in a blind alley or struck from behind. 

Vantage points. Long hours spent curled up in humid, unpleasant corners. It's lonely, surviving a plague alone, but Corvo is a patient man. A quiet man. It's safest that way.

* * *

The man has a harsh face. Angles of hunger, cheeks hollow, mouth carved into cruelty. Greasy limp hair the color of dirty river mud. Eyes that glitter and glitter and in some lights they’re light and in some they’re very, very dark. He alternates between stillness and feverish prowling movement, disconcerting, moving like he’s uncomfortable with his stillness or his own body. 

Corvo knows the face. He knows it. 

The man smiles and it makes him soft. 

“Let's get back,” he murmurs against Corvo’s temple. Corvo shivers. 

“Lead the way,” he says, because he doesn't know where he's going. 

The way is up. Up and up, through ruined ceilings and over rusting stairways, following the man’s flickering gesture. His feet find their way almost of their own accord. He knows the way, almost, hesitant, turning to look for a wan face and a razor smile. 

“Here,” the man calls, two stories up, and laughs in delight when Corvo scales the drainpipe to him in a matter of moments. He pauses to let Corvo touch him. 

It feels like it must have been so long since he’d last touched skin. It aches like it has been. He’s drunk on it, desperate with it, clumsy feet on decaying floors, fingers too tight when they catch the man’s wrist. 

The man knows his name. The man reaches back for him.

* * *

The cottage is very small, the cobbles leading to the door overgrown. Flowers riot up between them and grass pads his footsteps. There are benches lining the walls, a little covered bower in one corner. 

There's a door but when Corvo tries the knob idly it refuses to turn. There are windows too, but they're high and small and he can only glimpse warm-lit ceilings through them. 

The doll waits for him with its familiar painted lips, its wooden arms tucked behind its back with prim neatness. Its jacket is simple and neat and the blindfold is a pristine white. The shape of it is so familiar, some old friend with a face Corvo can't quite bring to mind anymore. 

“I can taste death in the air you carry here,” it whispers and bows to him. Wires sing softly as it does, wood clacking against wood. “But it is good to see you again.” 

Corvo smiles and ducks a little bow of his own. 

“The death isn't mine at least,” he murmurs and the doll inclines its head. 

“Not yet, dear Corvo,” it tells him and Corvo knows in some distant way the words should be a threat, but instead he laughs because it's a joke. 

“All things die,” the doll murmurs, and Corvo still smiles at that.

* * *

He leaves the dark little loft apartment the man had taken him to and the man follows. The man had sat by the window, running a whetstone down the vicious, graceless curve of his long kitchen knife, and Corvo had slept a fitful few hours. 

It had felt almost safe, the man at the window with his long knife, the beasts screaming in the distance. He’d still woken quickly. 

The man says nothing about following. He simply follows, and smiles when Corvo glances back at him.

* * *

He screams back into the face of a thing that looks like it should have been an insect. 

Bulging eyes. Broad, bladed hands that block his sword. 

He’d swung into the apartment and a moment later been nearly back out the window, the rush of the beast taking him off his feet. Mere inches from the window, slamming back into the wall just off from the window frame. A moment of his rib cage creaking, the bones of his arms bending painfully where he’d braced them to keep teeth away from his face. 

He strikes out blindly, slashing and driving the thing back far enough to pull his gun free of where grasping mandibles had pinned his arm close to his side. 

He shoots it right in the jaw. Nothing that will kill it, just shattering its mandibles in a spray of brown, sweet-smelling blood, the beast rearing back and roaring in pain and anguish. He kicks it away, knocks it back into the room-

A flash of metal and the scream cuts off into a gurgle. 

The man looks up at him, a knife in each hand, long and horrible in the pragmatism of their shape. There’s blood in a spray across his cheek. When he wrenches his knives free with a jerk the corpse jerks with it, a fitful toss of movement Corvo can’t be sure is only the body settling. 

“You need to be more careful,” the man scolds him, gentle and kind, and the adrenaline goes out of him in a sob.

* * *

They rest in an abandoned apartment above the one the mantis creature rots in, a dusty mattress not quite succumbed to damp. There had been blankets as well. Luxuries, ones Corvo can’t remember having. 

He wakes up warm. The man is awake as well, watching him, legs tangled together and Corvo’s arms around his waist. 

He smiles when he realizes Corvo is awake. His teeth are white and blunt and entirely human, entirely dangerous. Corvo’s breath catches. 

It seems entirely natural to kiss him. It seems like what should be done, and then the man’s mouth is against his and it is natural. It’s easy as breathing, the man climbing on top of him, the thigh slotting between his, the hand that comes up to grasp at his hair. 

The man’s mouth is so soft. 

It’s as easy as breathing. It’s as easy as if it had been rehearsed. The man laughs into his mouth and it’s delighted, so happy, nearly cruel with the capriciousness of it. Corvo shakes and wants and doesn’t know how to speak. 

“I want you,” the man bites out against Corvo’s throat and he has never felt the thin vulnerability of the skin over his jugular vein so immediately as now. 

It should be fear. He’s seen men with teeth as blunt as this man’s rip out a throat. He knows it’s possible, and yet the fear does not come and in its place is hot, liquid need. His hips jerk with no warning, pushing up against the sharp weight pressing back against him. 

“I,” he tries, and then his voice fails because the teeth are finding him and he can only keen at the pain of it. His hands clutch at bony shoulders, dragging him closer and closer. 

The teeth stop short of drawing blood and Corvo sobs for air. 

“You want me too,” the man whispers against the stinging bruise he’s left. “Have me.” 

It feels less as though he is _having_ the man and more that he’s surrendering to him. Surrendering to teeth and nails bitten to the quick, still sharp against his back as he works a finger and then another into him. Surrendering to the want, to the madness of skin against his, the way the man arches into his touch as if he knows him, as if he trusts him. 

“I’m ready,” the man whispers to him, teeth dragging over skin, and when Corvo doesn’t move quickly enough in slicking his cock the man does it for him, bats his hands away and throws a leg over him with an artless purpose that leaves Corvo swearing and gripping at his hips. 

He sinks home like a revelation. 

“Corvo,” the man murmurs into his mouth and his body surges back against Corvo’s cock, eager, wet, open for him. Whimpering against Corvo’s cheek when he tightens his grip on the man's hips, when he fucks into him harder, harder. Sighing and spattering hot come between them, going tight and shivering hot and Corvo shudders and comes and nearly shakes apart with it. 

Greedy fingers keep him close, a demanding mouth, “Corvo, Corvo.” 

He answers it with lips and his own hands, his own mouth. He holds the man until he drowses down into quiet and leaves Corvo staring up through the ruin of the roof at the setting sun. 

He should know the man's name. He does know it, only he can't quite remember-

* * *

Their roost is close to the Academy complex and so Corvo goes. 

It’s a vast complex, walled up like the Tower. Ornate statues of gnarled men bending over beakers and flasks, wielding scalpels like they’re anything more than knives. Pantheons, paint and gilding, grandeur clinging still to the cracks in the stone. Corvo perches and watches it for a time, meets empty stone eyes. 

The walls are several stories high. That might have been intimidating once but these days there’s no wall that can really stop him. They’re old walls, anyway. They have doors. They’d designed it to let people in and out. 

He’s not so stupid as to use the doors. He’s learned a few difficult lessons. There’s always a better way in.

* * *

The hallways are echoing and grand and Corvo supposes he’s glad of that. It gives him room to skirt the things that wander the building. 

Most of them are shadows, stalking by the end of the hallways, Corvo pausing and gesturing his companion to stop. Tall and twisted shapes, the beasts grown from this place, cloaked in academic robes or pale and naked. They have a hell of a reach and bloated faces, slashes of mouth that yawn into a maw of horrible jagged teeth. 

They aren’t hunting. Locked up in their elegant prison, he can’t imagine there’s much prey for them. It’s easier than he could hope to slip by them. 

He avoids the lecture halls for now, the laboratories he’s sure are infested with things he has no interest in encountering. The grand professor’s apartments above it all he saves for later, when he’ll need a rest. Instead he turns towards the basements, the places where the servants had lived and worked. The kitchens will be there, and any food left. 

He doesn’t realize his companion has stopped until he reaches the turn of a hallway and glances back to see him further back than he’d expected. He’s staring down a cross-hallway, one Corvo had glanced down and decided to pass by. 

There are pipes as thick around as his arm bolted to the ceiling, spidering out from that hallway in a dizzying web. The man is looking at them, and then back at Corvo, a certain blankness to his face that unsettles Corvo. 

He blinks when Corvo returns to him. 

“Can you smell it?” he asks, low. Corvo sniffs experimentally. 

Smoke, a hint of sweet gangrenous meat. Metal and decaying paper and mildewing plaster. Blood, dried in flaky patches on his arms and boots. And something like fish that makes him frown. 

“What is it?” he asks. 

His companion doesn’t reply, just starts down the hallway the pipes spread from like he expects Corvo to follow. Corvo does with a sigh. 

There aren’t many doors in this hall, he discovers. Most hang open, closets with simple cleaning tools or maintenance rooms. A dark room with rows of metal tanks three of him couldn’t quite get their arms around. The fish smell is growing heavier with every step further down the hall, an opaque smell with thickness to it, suppressing every other smell except the sharp cut of rust. 

The hallway culminates in a door, a metal door painted grey. No window, and there’s rusted holes where screws must have held a nameplate in place. His companion pauses here and Corvo pauses with him, listening for footsteps or signs of a trap. 

It’s silent. The whole basement is silent, which is hardly reassuring. The man doesn’t seem bothered in any case, moves to open the door when Corvo nods with a hand on his blade. The knob and latch don’t squeal as they open, at least. 

The room beyond is massive. 

At least two stories high, possibly more, the ceiling difficult to judge in the gloom. It’s more than twice as wide in both directions as well, the depth of it impossible to judge, and yet barely large enough to contain the machine. 

Pipes tangle and diverge and converge in a maddening tangle, dark metal that doesn’t reflect the flickering gaslight properly. Vats larger than he is tall, silent and honeycombed with more of the pipes. Struts bracing what he thinks might be motors, clockwork gears that look an instant from turning again. 

Something is dripping, deeper in the tangle of metal. The air is heavy with the smell of grease and rust and stagnant water. 

“A man named Sokolov made this, and it drove him mad,” the man says and slips through the doorway behind him into the room. A pale specter in the gloom, flashing movements that reflect back at them from odd places. “And then a man named Jindosh found it, and he made it perfect, and it drove him mad as well.” 

“What is it?” Corvo asks, quietly. Their voices echo back twisted, bouncing from curving metal surfaces until the whispers are almost unrecognizable. The man gestures him to follow and he goes with a hand on his sword. The dripping is louder when he steps away from the door, a slow even noise. 

There are walkways, he discovers as he passes them, narrow paths into the pipeworks just big enough to let a reasonably sized person through. The floor is a grate, drab steel over damp, discolored concrete, and it looks as if his footsteps there would echo loudly. The little passages turn quickly, make it impossible for him to see deeper into the dim nest of metal. 

The man leads him to what he thinks must be the control booth, a cramped little cubby with banks of dark dials and switches labeled with cryptic combinations of letters and numbers. There are papers on the floor, packets of documents stacked on every surface, going to mold in the damp. He doesn’t bother to look at them. 

“Here is where the oil was born,” the man whispers and points. 

Something seeps from the pipe in front of them. One of the biggest in the room, an artery bending into view from somewhere over their head to plunge into the heart of the nest. When he peers closer he can see that the slow, viscous drip is crimson. 

He swallows down a moment of nausea. There’s whale viscera hanging over their heads, silent and caustic. This is the refinery. Where the oil came from. 

“The machine’s empty now,” he reasons hoarsely and the man looks at him. 

“Is it?” he asks, and there’s something different about the echo of his voice in this horrible room. 

It’s silent. 

The dripping has stopped. 

“We should leave,” Corvo says, and the man follows him, and he shuts the door carefully behind them.

* * *

The thing that leaps on Corvo from the kitchen of the apartment they break into is wearing an absurd little waistcoat, filthy and ragged and buttoned securely around an emaciated waist. 

There is nothing else left of the professor it must have once been. Corvo throws it off him in a scrabble of blunt nails and onto the table across the room and shoots it in the gut. It screams at him, wailing and shrill, and he shoots it again and then brings his sword down across its throat to stop it bringing more of them. 

It makes a pitiful little corpse. This one had wasted away where most grew, skeleton bones growing gnarled, sticking out at odd angles. The sickness had come for it in tumors, jagged growths at its joints. Its mouth hangs open, wide and distorted like a bullfrog, a loose flap of skin hanging pendulous and grotesque. Its lips and chin are stained blue and brown. 

He pulls his sword free. He’s tired, he’s abruptly aware of that. Too long trudging down institutional hallways, too many little fights he can win but doesn’t want to expend the energy for. 

They’re alone in this professor’s apartment now, though. He feels his shoulders slump and his companion moves quietly behind him to shut and bolt the door. 

Corvo wipes sticky blood from his sword on the corner of the fine tablecloth, eyes the pretty porcelain dinnerware with no real interest. The apartment truly is fine, the property of someone rich once upon a time. Perhaps the beast he'd just killed and perhaps not. His companion perches on the arm of the fine, dusty couch and tilts his head when Corvo looks at him. 

“I’ve never been one for the academics,” Corvo says, and can’t help smiling a little when the man laughs in pure, childish delight. 

“They don’t seem to agree with you much, either,” comes the reply, and then Corvo is being lead to the bedroom with a chaste kiss to the corner of his mouth and he’s being put to bed with the kind of busy concern he can’t truly fight. 

He sleeps fitfully, wakes often with his face pressed to the nape of his companion’s neck, and if he dreams he remembers none of it.

* * *

He sprawls out in a mouldering amphitheater seat and rubs bloody fingers together absently. 

Dimly lit by flickering gaslight and holes in the ceiling, it's almost possible to see the former glory of the vast lecture hall. Gilt glitter over the rotting wood banisters, the gleam of surgical gurneys lined at the back of the stage, the podium to the side for the lecturer to declaim from. The Academy of Natural Philosophy had been rich, when money had meant something. 

There's blood running like brown syrup down the aisles. Birds, almost. Sickened as everything else is, vast and monstrous birds that screamed and fell to his blade with some difficulty. They had come from the rafters and between the seats and he had danced. He can almost remember dancing, the flick of a skirt against his legs, warm-lit ballrooms and music. He's almost sure he remembers it. 

“There were atrocities here,” comes the whisper in his ear. He sighs and tilts his head up for a kiss. 

The man smiles down at him, a razor of white teeth in a pallid face. No blood on him. Corvo almost feels bad for tugging him down insistently for his kiss. It leaves a sticky, bloody smear on the man's collar. 

“There are still atrocities here,” he remarks against the man's mouth, and the man nods thoughtfully. 

“How does it compare, dear Corvo?” he asks, and he's climbing over the back of his seat, a knee on the railing by Corvo’s shoulder and then slipping down with impossible grace to rest with a knee to either side of Corvo’s legs. “The atrocities a man commits to another man, and the atrocities of a scale balancing itself. You slaughter birds. The kind doctors slaughtered each other.” 

Corvo sighs and takes the man's waist, pulls him forward until he feels cool breath against his ear. 

“I'm no judge,” he says, careless with exhaustion. “I'm not here to give my opinions to corpses.” 

The man laughs, ducks forward to mouth at the join of shoulder and throat. 

“What are you here for, then?” he murmurs, and Corvo frowns dizzily, tightens his grip on the man's hips. 

“I'm looking for…” he begins slowly and trails off because he almost knows, he can almost remember.

* * *

He wakes to a familiar garden. 

The doll is seated at the door but it stands to meet him almost at once, and if its lips weren’t paint and carved wood Corvo is sure it would smile. 

“You look well,” it greets him and extends a hand. Corvo takes it and bows over it. A flourish, a useless movement, a bit of fashionable dandyism borrowed from a memory he can’t quite bring fore. 

The doll is laughing and the thought blows to mist. The sun is rising at its shoulder and it lights up the garden in gilt. 

“I know you,” Corvo says, and the doll inclines its head in answer. 

“Dance with me,” he demands whimsically and the doll laughs again through painted lips and allows Corvo to take its hands and settle them in the right place. He's carrying it through the motions but it doesn't seem to mind, keeps laughing, a cool cheek against his. 

There's no music, no rhythm. His feet scuff the cobbles and wooden heels click down every once in a while. 

The doll is still laughing when Corvo deposits it back on its feet, helps it straighten its jacket. It bats his hands away when he tries to adjust its blindfold and he should be curious, he should want to know, but all he feels is warmth in his chest. 

“Thank you, my dear,” the doll says and bows, shallow and from the waist.

* * *

They watch a man comb an abandoned and looted warehouse, going through the shelves Corvo knows don't have food anymore. He doesn't look up, doesn't search the ductwork and rafters for where they're perched. It's a wonder he's lived this long. 

“Is he human still?” he murmurs to his companion because he's better at telling than Corvo most of the time. 

The man laughs soundlessly, a brush of cool air against the shell of his ear. 

“They're all human,” he murmurs. Corvo frowns. 

“But does he _count_ ,” he asks and the man doesn't answer that.

* * *

Before the sickness had taken the whole city walls had been built. 

Walls to keep the beasts in or out. Walls between houses, between neighborhoods, vast monsters of stone and metal and cement between the districts. It makes the going slow and labyrinthine, when sometimes even traversing a city block takes hours of climbing or crawling through the sewers. 

Corvo is a patient man. He does his crawling and climbing, and fights the things that attack him and tries to sneak past those that don’t see him in time to. The walls are an annoyance and no more than that. 

He sleeps on rooftops, sometimes. Sometimes there are rooms, abandoned rooms collapsing in their own disrepair, that are safe to linger in. He can wrap himself in his coat and pull his companion close when he’s there and sleep for fitful hours. It doesn’t seem to matter so much, for how long he sleeps. The sun always seems to be setting when he wakes.

* * *

The lantern at the door to the cottage is lit. He watches the candle flicker for a little while. 

“The leviathans burned in the harbor and sickness spreads from them,” the doll murmurs. Corvo turns away from the lantern and sits heavily at its feet. “Everywhere, I can smell oil burning.”

A cool hand finds Corvo’s hair, wooden fingers combing their greasy strands and tugging gently at the matted clumps. The spiderweb wires catch for a moment and Corvo lets his eyes drift closed. 

There are flowers everywhere but he can't smell them. 

“I'm scared I'm not strong enough,” Corvo confesses and then frowns. The words are true, and incomprehensible. 

“You worry so much, Corvo. Go back to sleep,” the doll soothes him, and cool wooden fingertips drag down the back of his neck.

* * *

He goes through the cabinets of a grand drawing room because he’s bored and there is blood, dried and tugging at the shorthairs of his arms. He had killed, and it hardly bothers him anymore, but the adrenaline is heavy and makes it difficult to sleep. 

His companion watches him from the desk, cross-legged and silent. He turns a delicate letter opener over and over in his hands, the blade flashing at him. 

There’s money and he throws that onto the floor carelessly. A box of bullets he tucks carefully into his bag. Letters he rifles through and discards after reading a line or so. Business letters, accounts in banks that lie empty, inventory to stores now looted and boarded up. A mine in Serkonos going dry. 

Corvo throws those on the floor too. Boring and pointless. 

He wrenches open a locked drawer in a crack of wood giving way to find an Overseers mask and that, that gives him pause. 

The mask is stolen from him with a jerk and he looks up to see his companion settling it onto his face. It doesn’t fit, too big for his head and hanging heavy over bony shoulders, and the chill goes through Corvo anyway. Glittering eyes through the holes of the mask, a flash of teeth white and blunt and wicked. It shines in the spare candlelight. Perfectly polished. A mocking, horrible smile. 

“I think we could pay the Abbey a visit,” he muses, and the man takes off the mask. He’s smiling. It’s a nicer smile. 

“Feeling devout?” he asks whimsically. “Would you like me to recite Strictures for you, tonight?” 

“Blasphemer,” Corvo teases, and the man laughs as he pushes Corvo down into the chair and climbs his lap like he’s conquering him.

* * *

He makes a mistake. 

A thing of this size shouldn’t be able to move so quietly, he thinks, dizzy and unfocused as it shakes him in its massive paws. 

He’d thought the apartment had been empty, listening from the window and seeing the untouched barricade across the front door. A silent apartment, and so he’d let his back be to the hallway as he turned to call his companion quietly through. 

It might have been a bear once, Corvo hadn’t had a chance to see much of it before it’d been on him, a roar that shakes his bones and paws like plates with claws of steel. There’s a mouth more like a maw, fangs like an animal meant for ripping into meat. 

It throws him across the room as easily as throwing a doll. 

He slams into the barricade over the front door. The whole teetering pile of rubble and barricading furniture collapses down over him with a slow thunder. 

Pain doesn’t register. Vertigo, dizzy and sick, the tunneling of his vision and the speed of his pulse. Instead he is aware only of the fact that his legs are trapped by a table and heavy chunks of plaster, the beast scrabbling against the floorboards in the beginning of a charge. 

There isn’t enough time. Corvo registers that as the beast throws itself forward with a roar that shakes the whole world. Paw-first, steel claws glinting. 

A knife catching the edge of a claw and if there was breath or hope left in his body Corvo would scream with it, because his companion is too small to stop that much weight, that much strength. There is no way for that little knife to hold, and it doesn’t. It breaks with a scream of metal on metal. 

It deflects enough, and the man plunges his knife into the beast’s neck with a hiss of venom and wrath that reminds Corvo dizzily of pantheons. He wrenches it free as the beast roars, spasms, vast clawed paws coming up. It strikes a second too slow. 

The man’s knife plunges into its eye up to the hilt and then the paw is batting him across the room like an unwanted toy. 

The animal that had once been a man dies in spasms and writhing seizures nearly on top of where Corvo is pinned. His companion lies a heap of dark clothing and still, pale skin across the room, and his vision is blurring so that he can’t tell if the man is breathing or not, and he slides down into darkness.

* * *

It takes Corvo far too long to find it, broken and lifeless in the tall garden grass. 

The doll is a sprawl of wooden parts. It doesn’t move as Corvo slides to his knees next to it, as he lifts the wooden mass of its head, hanging loose on its wires and clever wooden joints. 

The panic that grips him shakes him to the core. His hands would tremble, if he allowed them to. 

It’s still mostly intact, Corvo discovers, tugging the wires this way and that, righting the order of its limbs, tidying its neat little coat. Only a hand loose, a snapped wire that makes his gut churn to look at. 

His hands know what to do, feeding wire thin as hair through tiny eyelets, moving delicate wooden finger bones with a surgeon's tenderness. His hands ache for some reason, his whole body hurts in unyielding waves, but he pushes through it. He forces his hands to be steady. They know what needs to be done. 

He has nothing to fuse the wires with so he just ties them, laborious and careful to leave as much slack as possible. It still leaves the wire short. Corvo bites back bitter, furious bile as he gathers the doll into his arms and carries it to the little bench under the bower. 

He has to rest the doll’s hand in its lap to keep the wire slack enough to keep the knot in place, but he manages. It looks like a man sleeping when he's finished, clothes only a little rumpled and dirty. 

A man sleeping in a blindfold. Corvo curses and settles himself heavily in the grass to stare up at the morning sky.

* * *

He pulls himself free of the wreckage, free of the stinking, rotting bear-creature that had once been a man. He drags himself to the heap of clothing and pasty skin and sobs brokenly with relief when a pulse meets his fingers. 

The man groans when Corvo shakes him awake but he seems lucid, doesn’t seem too badly hurt. He doesn’t protest when Corvo gets them both hobbling to their feet. 

He grabs their bags, remembers to pull the man’s remaining knife free of the corpse’s eye. The noise it makes is wet and horrible and Corvo doesn’t flinch from it. 

He pushes them both up to the next floor, the apartment above. It’s empty. There are bottles lined up on the shelves, clear glass, clean water. This is an abandoned safehouse, and Corvo would search out the story behind it, but his body courses with pain and his companion’s face is drawn and white and lined in agony and exhaustion. Instead he puts them both to bed as soon as he’s checked that the door is barricaded, wraps them up in dusty blankets and winds himself around the man until he feels that every breath he takes is being pulled from the other’s lungs.

* * *

In the heat of a summer evening Dunwall barely smells any different than it had before the sickness had come. Decay and stagnant water and broken sewer pipes. Bodies going to rot where they had fallen in some forgotten corner. The memory intrudes sometimes, unwelcome and useless. Only a memory of a smell with no context attached to it. 

The tar meant to seal the street is buckled by disrepair and rippling in the heatwave. It shimmers, promising and lovely like a puddle in the distance, a mirage. The sun sits like a fat toad on the horizon, heavy and ponderous and hot with its own weight. It sheds barely any light at all. A dying, sullen thing. From Corvo’s rooftop, the road is something to dive into. 

A look back the way he came and then ahead up the road. 

One foot in front of the other. He shoulders his jacket to a better hang and taps the gun at his hip for luck.

* * *

He watches a creature licking oil from an alley’s dirty cobbles for a time. 

The balcony is high and as safe as it could be, rail rusting wrought iron. He perches on it and watches because the beast will move on eventually and he's tired, so ungodly tired, and he doesn't want to waste a bullet. It's almost nice, to rest and watch and not fight. 

“What does it taste like?” he asks idly. The man at his elbow shrugs. 

In the street the beast has begun leaving bloody streaks on the street, tongue tearing on the jagged cobbles, mindlessly licking after the blue glow of spilled oil. There's almost nothing of a man left in it, legs lupine and clawed, face a bloodied muzzle. Blood and mud and oil matted into its hair in a crimson-brown mess that shines faintly in the shadows of the street. 

“They’re so far gone,” the man whispers. He looks small, chin hooked over the railing to watch, his body a hunched and dainty thing, twisted almost like a beast himself. “They don’t know, when they finally try to drink it. They’ve forgotten how to taste.” 

“But what does it _taste_ like,” Corvo presses. The man looks at him, head turning against the railing so his cheek rests against metal. His eyes glitter and glitter. 

“It’s oil, Corvo,” he answers.

* * *

“There are no more sermons in the Abbey,” the doll murmurs. They are out in the garden for once, wandering among the flowers. The sun is low on the horizon and it occurs idly to Corvo that he’s not quite certain if it’s rising or setting. 

“A shame,” he says sardonically and the doll’s head tilts. If its mouth moved Corvo suspects it would be smiling. 

“No more sermons,” the rasping voice tells him, a gentle reproof. “No more lecturers in the great Academy halls. The Tower is shuttered and rot ebbs within its walls. No more tailors, no more lawyers, not even the Bottle Street boys stir the streets anymore.” 

“I wander a dead city,” Corvo says, and the sun is not quite so warm with that thought in his head. 

The doll regards him with blindfolded eyes. 

“A city is no living thing,” it murmurs at last. A hand lifts to Corvo’s cheek, the fine grain of its wooden bones catching against his stubble. “And nor, my dear, am I. There are more important things than life.” 

They return to wandering. The sun is warm once again.

* * *

He leaves his companion to rest while he goes to look for food. 

It doesn't worry him much. The man is more dangerous than Corvo is with his vicious long knives, more patient and quiet. Almost tender, how he stalks the shadows of his quarry. No, it doesn't worry Corvo at all. 

He moves on quiet feet down into the street. 

The buildings nearby are picked clean, desiccated corpses of themselves. Not even beasts linger in them, leaving empty dusty rooms to collapse on themselves. A fire had gutted a few of them, and he stirs the ashes for a moment. Melted silverware, the stumps of sturdy, pragmatic furniture. Nothing of use, nothing of interest. He moves on. He’s hungry, and they don’t have much food left. 

Something moves in the street ahead and he climbs onto a bracing strut to get a better view. 

It’s shaped like a man. 

It’s shaped like a normal man, and it’s moving with purpose, a loping gait eating up the distance down the street and away from him. The man looks like he’s going somewhere, like he _knows_ somewhere to go, and Corvo’s back down in the street and darting after him before he can quite think it through. 

He pauses at an intersection then strikes right, down a street half-blocked by a downed railcar line. He scales it with ease that speaks to practice, and by the time Corvo’s found his own way up and over the obstruction all he sees is darting movement in through the broken window of a bottom-floor apartment. 

The man is walking through the doorway into the hall when Corvo catches up and peeks in. He’s gone down the hall by the time Corvo carefully steps through the broken window glass. 

He has the sense to approach quietly, but the man is skinny and rumpled, and he’s standing in the kitchen with rosy sunlight falling around him, and Corvo-

“Hey-,” Corvo begins. 

The man turns and roars and Corvo swears and throw himself to the side because _shitting Void_. 

The man's tongue hangs to its knees, a knotted writhing wet thing with thorns. Black saliva drying in crusts down the front of its shirt, rotting gums, and there are bloody swollen furrows down its cheeks and over weeping empty eye sockets and Corvo realizes what the thing must have done to its _eyes_. 

The beast rushes him and he shoots it in the throat. When it keeps moving he stabs it a few times through the face and chest until the shuddering has mostly stopped. 

There's a few cans of soup in the cabinets when he riffles through them and he can wipe his sword carefully on the curtains before he goes.

* * *

His quiet companion is waiting for him with a smile and a knife in his lap, wicked and flashing in the sickly red light through the windows. 

He nearly runs to Corvo, eager, kisses him so sweet. 

Corvo kisses back, seizes the man's waist, pulls him close and opens his mouth like a drowning sailor. He’s so human, human in shape and breath and the taste of him in Corvo’s mouth. He's dying of thirst, he's baking from the inside out and the man moaning and arching into the touch feels the only succor for him. 

The bag with the cans of soup hits the ground with a thump.

“I missed you,” the man murmurs. He tastes of nothing, he bites viciously, and Corvo thinks he must leave bruises with the desperation of his grip but the man doesn't complain. His blunt nails bite into the back of his neck, his arm, everywhere he can reach. 

“Take me to bed,” he whispers into the ferocity of the kiss and Corvo doesn’t think he could ever want to disobey. 

The man burrows into Corvo’s arms like he's trying to dig a home in Corvo’s ribcage, all nails and teeth and lips and tongue. It's savagery. It's painful and Corvo would beg for it if he had to but he doesn't, he only has to open his arms and let the man in. He conquers, claims, leaves Corvo with red marks that bead with crimson blood, black bruises in the shape of teeth.

He paints artistry with sweat and blood and come and Corvo whines his appreciation only because he's broken his voice too thoroughly to scream it. He leaves Corvo sore and hollow and sated, curls up with his chin on Corvo’s chest and kisses him sweetly to soothe the sting and smiles at him with teeth that sometimes have blood in them, though not today. 

“I could just eat you up,” he croons, and Corvo’s heart beats like butterflies.

* * *

For a little while he searches the gardens because he can’t find the doll. 

It’s waiting for him when he finally thinks to circle the cottage and check the leeward side. In the shadow of the building is a little pool, crystal waters and lily pads floating in it, the kind of thing to have fish in it though he can see none. There are benches and the doll sits on one, hands folded together, pristine and unmoving until Corvo sits next to it. 

“No fish?” he asks and the doll shakes its head. 

“The water is the important thing,” it rasps to him, and Corvo nods and doesn’t quite understand. 

“What has you pondering so hard?” he asks, and the doll looks out into the pond with its blindfolded eyes. 

“They feed animals to machines and call it power,” it murmurs. “They feed empresses to empires and call that power too. An interesting parallel.” 

Corvo finds that he has nothing to say.

* * *

The Abbey yawns open for them in much the same way that a ribcage yawns around lungs. 

There had been a fire. A catastrophic fire by the signs left of it, the way it had peeled the skin from the stone bones, the plaster and gilt fallen away to expose how vast and brutal the building had been under it all. Ash has been beaten to a muddy black paste across the flagstones, drag marks here and there to mark where something had been and is no longer. 

The core of the building still stands, sturdy enough to outlast a fire. The upper stories are even still bleached pale, painted rose and scarlet by the setting sun. The whole thing smells of sulfur and ash. 

A lone beast wanders the courtyard. A hulking thing, tusks like knives too big for its jaw, forcing its mouth into a drooling gape. It lumbers uncertainly across the yard and sniffs at piles of wet, charred wood, and it takes no notice of them as they scale a drainpipe on the side of the building. 

Inside the building echoes with its own emptiness. 

It had been designed to awe, to inspire fear and worship and shame. Even brought to its knees Corvo still bites down on a swell of nerves at stepping inside it. 

The man steps inside with a laugh that would be brazen, if caution didn’t silence it to a huff of air and eyes that dance. Corvo follows him off the ledge and into the rotting Archive room, and nudges his hip in joking reproval. The air here smells faintly of smoke and more strongly of wet paper and strongest of all of offal. 

There are heavy footsteps out in the hall. Treading back and forth, back and forth. The thing must be massive, the stone floor trembles with its passage. It doesn’t make a sound that isn’t its footsteps. 

“I want to see the High Overseer’s office,” Corvo’s companion presses close to mouth against his ear, and Corvo shrugs because he hardly has anything better to do. 

The way up to the office is winding, avoiding whatever massive beast patrols the hallways. Back stairways, crawling along a heating duct above a dining room that swims in the stink of what Corvo hopes dismally is just the remains of a rotting dinner. There’s a rib cage poking up from a silver platter. It’s reasonably small. It could have been a pig. 

He pushes open a window above the door and drops down into the hallway below. There’s a rudimentary barricade of furniture just down the hall; not enough to stop anything determined to come through, but enough to hide them from anything coming from that direction. 

The footsteps pound on below them. He’s almost stopped noticing the way it makes the building tremble. 

“I don’t think it can hear us,” the man murmurs, a rush of cool air against Corvo’s ear that makes him flinch and bat at him irritably. He’s grinning, flashing white teeth in the gloom. “If we’re quiet.” 

Corvo rolls his eyes and swipes a hand through his greasy hair in retaliation. 

The High Overseer’s office is at the center of a block of lesser offices. Once, a bulwark against the disturbances of the lesser workings of the Abbey. Secretaries and underlings and sundry clergymen meant to keep the laypeople from coming where they shouldn’t, from wasting the time of a holy man. Now, only wet paper and lacquered wood and nothing of especial interest.

His companion sweeps by the desks without a glance. Corvo spends a moment shuffling through the contents of a single desk before boredom and disinterest drive him to follow. 

The inner office is more clean than the outer had been; broad windows to let in the bloody light, fewer papers scattered across the floor. There’s a pool of what had been blood in the corner, but no bodies, and the smell is barely unpleasant. 

The man stands in front of a mold-stained map plastered over an entire wall. A map of the known world, picked out in jewel tones barely dimmed by time and decay. He has a hand on the mountains of Pandyssia, picks idly at the trade currents drawn in cerulean and turquoise. He glances over his shoulder at Corvo with a cryptic smile before returning to digging long aimless scratches in the mural. 

Corvo goes to the desk. A monster of a thing, burnished red wood and copper fittings. A desk befitting a man of high status, he thinks, and kicks the leg sardonically. 

The desk is mostly clean, astonishingly tidy. Only a packet of papers bound in twine and a little wooden box. Under them, a map of Dunwall, little red pins affixed in clusters. He squints at them and can’t make any sense of the pattern, only that they cluster closer to the river and spread thinner the farther from the water they go. 

Without labels the map means nothing and he disregards it to pick up the box. It rattles when he shakes it, the wood thin enough and the box light enough not to worry him. There’s no trap here. 

He tips the box out onto the desk. 

Little brittle bones. They glow in the dim room.

Piles of them, desiccated and bleached and preserved too professionally to be from the era of the rising sickness. Too small to be a man’s bones. They look like… Corvo swallows back heavy sickness and prods at them gently. He knows the word for this sort of bone, somehow. Phalanges. The remains of the hands of at least two children. 

He leaves them and picks up the documents, slits the twine with a jerk and flips through them. The man has crossed the room to his side but he can’t pay attention to him, only to the papers in his hands. 

It’s a treatise and a report. There are diagrams. Graphs and equations. Headings and subheadings, paragraphs of dry prose describing processes that escape him. Profiles labeled only _Subject_ and then a bold, dehumanized number. No name for the profile but everything else laid out with medical precision; weight and height, gender and age, time of death. Descriptions of procedures, and he can feel his teeth creak with how his jaw clenches at the poetry of this anonymous writer, emerging only in describing the _artistry_ their surgeons exhibited. 

The conclusion thanks the Abbey and the High Overseer for their provision of subjects, and offers a curiosity as a gift of thanks. Bones left over from the first attempts. It’s diplomatically and cleverly put. An atrocity dissected and laid out in serifed typeface and precise ink sketches. 

He swallows more sour bile. 

There is no location attached to the foul, awful thing in the pages. But there is allusion to water, and a scathing remark about the whaling industry. The map takes new meaning and Corvo lets the pages fall from his hands to scatter across the floor. 

The footsteps continue below them, heavy, even, monotonous and unchanging. Back and forth, until Corvo feels them treading down on his spirit. 

“The plague was well earned,” he spits when he finds his voice, and his chest is full of so much poison he’s absently surprised it doesn’t spill from his lips to spatter on his chest. 

His companion looks at him. The bone box is in his hands. 

“Corvo,” the man says and there is such pain in his voice. Corvo discovers it’s more than he can bear. 

The venomous, burning anger is already spilling over in the bitter streak of tears as he turns away. He finds he can’t remember ever tasting so much hate. It tastes like vomit, like the sickly blood of beasts, like oil melting in his mouth. Thick and sour nothingness. 

A hand touches his shoulder and he wipes at his cheeks, scrubbing hard. The tears had stopped as soon as they’d come but they still ache in his throat, and he swallows against it as cool weight settles against his back. A forehead pressing between his shoulder blades. Another hand at his other shoulder. 

“We go to the docks,” he snarls. The man nods against his back. 

“A moment,” he murmurs, so quiet Corvo strains to hear. “Just a moment. Please.” 

Corvo waits. The anger slowly goes cold in him, the hate draining away and leaving him hollow, filled up with nothing but grief. Eventually, the muscles of his back release and he can turn and pull the man closer. 

The man clings to him like he thinks Corvo would push him away. Tight fingers and biting nails and all the reckless abandon the man lives and breathes. It’s balm, or as close to it as Corvo thinks he can accept. He holds on just as tightly, winds his fingers in dirty hair and closes his eyes against the whole of Dunwall and holds on. 

The footsteps continue. Eventually Corvo forces himself to move. 

“We have to go,” he murmurs, and the man nods. He holds on a moment longer, fingers biting into Corvo’s ribs, and then he’s whirling away in a swirl of filthy coat and pallid hands. He doesn’t go to the window; he goes to the desk and picks up the bone box. 

“What-,” Corvo begins sharply. 

Too loudly. The footsteps beneath them pause for a long, torturous beat, and then resume. In the direction of the stairs. 

The man hisses out a breath and scrapes the bones into the box, puts the lid back on carefully and then he’s darting past Corvo and out the window onto the ductwork. The box is secure under his arm and his eyes are so dark when he peers back into the room at Corvo. 

“We’ll bury them,” he says, and then he’s out along the ducts and Corvo is edging out the window after him.

* * *

They bury the box of child’s bones in a garden not-quite totally dead, behind a house boarded-up and deserted. There are still leaves on the trees, and the grass is yellowing but there are green patches. As good a place for a child to rest as any left. 

Corvo doesn’t cry this time but his throat aches and his companion has to lead him inside by the hand and sit with him for what must be an hour. 

He doesn’t speak, but he curls up at Corvo’s side and rests his cool temple against his shoulder, and when Corvo stands he hands him his sword and presses a kiss to his cheek. It’s kindness, it’s what Corvo needs and can accept, and he’s grateful for it.

* * *

He nearly loses a hand to a thing so far on from humanity he nearly doesn't feel bad for how many times he needs to stab it before it stops twitching. 

Too many limbs. Skinny, bony arms, almost a dozen of them that grasped and dragged along a body torn ragged by the jagged city street. A head almost entirely mouth, thin lips stained with blood and blue oil. It had been eyeless, tasting the air after him with a stubby fat little tongue. 

Faster than he'd expected, but not fast enough. He's left kneeling by a stinking corpse, trying to tie a torn length of sheet around the deep cut in his arm with one hand, growling with frustration, dizzy with blood loss. 

A pale hand intrudes, takes the ends of the sheet and tuck them into a neat little knot. Corvo looks up into bright, feverish eyes. 

“Oh, Corvo,” he chides, and Corvo smiles and feels something like a guilty schoolboy.

* * *

“The scales swing towards balance, but there are still questions of what will fall in order to right them,” the doll tells him. 

“I am tired,” Corvo tells the doll, and isn’t surprised when it doesn’t subside obediently into quiet. 

“You have taken,” it tells him, presses forward insistently. Corvo gives easily, dances back on garden paths. There is no danger here, nothing at risk, only perhaps the wrath of a doll. “Man has taken, and taken, and when the balance came due it was found wanting, and so restitution is given.” 

Corvo stops, and the doll stops with him. There is no anger, no move to press forward and force him back. The doll watches him, and he is tired, so tired. 

“We took in oil and we pay in blood,” he murmurs. The doll’s wires sing.

* * *

“Take me,” the man murmurs above Corvo’s head, and yes, yes, he’ll take every inch of it. 

He chokes and pulls back. Breathes for a moment. His throat aches. His eyes sting a little, and the man’s hand is in his hair and that hurts too, and he could never ask for more than this. It feels so good, _too_ good, he feels so alive. 

He sucks the man’s cock back into his mouth. All the way down until it’s choking him, the ache of his throat bringing tears to his eyes again. 

He bobs there for a minute, maybe two, and then the hand in his hair pulls him back up and he sighs with it, goes where the man directs him easily. A messy kiss, wet and tasting of precome. Corvo clings to what he can reach with desperate numb fingers and kisses back. 

“Fuck me,” the man murmurs into the kiss. A nose nudging against Corvo’s, a brush of lips against his so sweet and gentle and unexpected. “Corvo, please.” 

There is no name, no words in the sound Corvo responds with. It’s a yes in any case; a keening moan of a yes. 

Wet fingers and tight heat. Fingernails against his shoulders, and he nuzzles into the man’s belly as he fingers him open, shelters himself there. The man bites down on his shoulder as he presses inside until his teeth break skin in a bright arc of agony and blood. Corvo doesn’t come for another half dozen thrusts, but it’s a close thing, the smell of his blood in the air and in his mouth where the man kisses him. 

“Corvo, Corvo,” the man croons to him as he ruts against Corvo’s thigh, as he comes in a burst of wet heat. He sags into Corvo’s grip still humming something that sounds like it could have been his name.

* * *

He murders a madman and finds his collection of whale oil in the stinking, rotting den he'd defended so viciously. 

There's blood in his mouth. His own, but not entirely. He can taste the difference, the sickly sweetness of the disease in the madman’s blood. He works it around in his mouth and stares at the soft, beautiful glow of the little glass vials. 

Once, they would have been a little fortune. Now they are priceless, an irresistible siren, and Corvo spits his mouthful of blood onto them. 

His companion waits for him, crouched over the madman’s corpse, a hand bloody to the wrist and otherwise pristine. He looks up at Corvo with wide, dark eyes. 

Corvo expects words that don't come, and eventually he gestures for them to go, and the man follows.

* * *

The doll waits for him with its painted smile and pristine blindfold and he seats himself next to it and tries to ignore how his joints ache. 

“You have so little time,” the doll sighs and a cool hand finds his. “There's no such thing in this place, but still the clock ticks.”

“There's still enough time, right?” Corvo asks and his voice is rapid with an urgency he doesn't really understand. “We still have time?”

The doll pats the back of his hand. 

“There is still time,” comes the whispery voice. “You have given up so much, dear Corvo, and I… I am worn nearly through. But oh, there is time.”

The sunlight here is yellow and sweet and clean, comes down slanting and perfect. It's cool here, under the shade of the bower. Corvo could ask what it means, could ask what he's running out of time for, but he doesn't. Instead Corvo closes his eyes and turns his face up to the stroke of a wooden hand.

* * *

He crawls through half a mile of ductwork to restore power to the rail system, though he spends longer wondering if it really is a good idea when inevitably every beast and creature in a mile will find him in the time it takes to jimmy the lock and spark the ignition. 

Quiet hands help him, ferry their loads of water and canned fish and stale bread from where they'd hidden them to the railcar.

“It'll be loud,” he says dubiously and Corvo shrugs. 

“We need to move quickly,” he answers. “There's too many walls between us and the water.” 

The man smiles, that lovely smile that makes his cruel mouth something to dream about. 

“I'll concede the point,” he says and climbs primly into the passenger seat. His hands are folded so neatly in his lap. 

The car is dark and the hum of the rails is more likely than not drawing things they don’t want to encounter, but they haven’t arrived yet. Corvo leaves his hand on the release lever and leans across to kiss him until he whines because there's not much time left but there's time enough for this.

* * *

The doll is waiting for him under the biggest tree in the garden. 

He knows nothing of botany. He’s not much for the philosophy, hadn’t been even before the sickness had come. The tree’s leaves are green, and he leaves it at that. They hang low over the ground, shelter the two of them in secretive, giddy dimness. 

“I see so much, and yet all of the future is shrouded in fog,” the doll tells him. It had been standing but sat when Corvo had, pristine clothing now dusty, grass bending under the slight wooden weight. It sits with stillness that would disconcert, except that Corvo finds that he doesn’t really care. 

“I don’t need to know the future,” he says idly, and stretches his legs out further. His body is stiff, a little painful in moving. He feels old, older than he is, though he can’t quite recall the exact number of his years. 

“It would do no good, in any case,” the doll says and turns its head to look at him. “Fate is often unkind, drawing those it wants where it wants them.” 

“Is that what I am?” he asks and it’s somehow a joke, it’s all a joke, there’s laughter bubbling up in his ribcage. “Fated?” 

The doll gestures, a motion so simple it means nothing. 

“Aren’t all things bound by fate?” it asks whimsically.

* * *

“It’s dark here,” the man murmurs to him, and Corvo nods his assent. 

The people had built the walls high here, before. Four stories or more, impenetrable walls of metal and stone. It must have been in the deepest throes of the sickness, Corvo thinks, because the notices are still glued to the walls with rotting wheatpaste. Admonishments to quarantine the sick, threats of detainment. Plague ordinances. 

The sun is setting and that sends long shadows across the streets. It’s easy to move like that, masked by darkness, scurrying along a ledge and then leaping to exposed pipework to examine the street below for a moment. It should feel secure, and it doesn’t. 

This district is silent. It had been residential, once. 

The walls block the wind from the river as well. It smells sour in this cramped space. Stagnant like old water and metal. A little sweet over the top of that. Sweet like decaying fruit. He breathes it in and frowns. It’s not quite rotting meat, or maybe it’s rotting meat but other things, too. 

The man touches his elbow, gestures on. They keep going. 

There’s a fire going deep in the district. He can track it by the pillar of smoke, what had tempted him to burrow his way into this closed little district in the first place. The smoke stabbing at the bloody sunset. It smells like a woodfire, none of the metallic tang of an industrial fire. 

The streets are a maze but empty of threats it feels simple to navigate. He swings from strut to duct and the foreboding grows and grows and still his companion says nothing. 

The fire is a bonfire in the little cleared space of the main plaza. 

Men attend it- not men, but beasts in the shape of men. Tall, the requisite number of arms and legs, but firelight shines from the grease on their faces and he can make out the horrible grimace of mouths overstuffed with teeth. 

This one has scythe claws weighing its hands down, vicious glinting keratin curves. That one has exposed jaws, wet muscle and enamel gleaming horribly. They are not men; they are beasts. 

He edges out to see what they are doing better. 

They tend to the fire, ferrying wood to it in long caravans winding back to the plaza from the edges of the district. They dance, and sing, or something that looks like it could be either of those things, gibbering and jerking motion. There's something roasting over the fire. It looks almost like a celebration. 

The thing turning on the spit over the fire has long legs, long arms. Its skin crackles as it cooks. 

Corvo doesn’t vomit. There’s no point in it. 

“Out the way we came,” he murmurs to his companion, and they withdraw on silent feet. The man’s hand finds his and he threads their fingers together, clings tight and looks up at the bruised sky.

* * *

He rests in a little shack built on the roof of a building abandoned and dusty with years older than even the plague. There’s not even a beast to watch him drag a mattress from the next building over, wrapping a ragged blanket around the two of them and tucking his companion in close to his chest. 

Cool breath against his sternum. A heartbeat he measures greedily, fluttering as Corvo presses a thumb to his wrist. Lips tilting up to catch the corner of Corvo’s jaw. 

He still smells like river water. Corvo breathes in and savors the way there’s no blood or rotting meat in it.

* * *

“So soon you'll find your way into the sea,” the doll murmurs. “And we will all find the end of our paths. There are so few choices left for you.”

“Are there any left at all?” he asks drowsily. The doll nods, a slow bob of blindfolded head. 

“There is always a last choice,” it tells him. 

“Then I'm content,” Corvo says. It’s true. He’s content, somehow, his heartbeat slow and even, calm sinking down through him like a drug. He drowses, wooden bones moving in his hair, and is content.

* * *

The docks stink of seawater fouled with human waste, like rotting behemoths. The concrete of its paths is stained with blood older than the plague. The whole of it is tumbling down, thin metal struts and the steel of pipes rusting through and bringing the building down with them. 

There are whale corpses, rotting on the hooks. Nothing but bones and the shrunken rope of tendon, a vicious skull peering back at them with its dark eye sockets. 

When the wind sings in from the ocean in fitful bursts the whole district groans in answer. Otherwise it’s horribly silent. Nothing seems to wander here.

* * *

It takes him some time to find the building only because the sea has done its work in storms and waves, washing away most traces except the stubborn bloodstains. 

It’s the Abbey’s mark that leads him there eventually. The Abbey had no business with the whalers, he knows that much. An uneasy truce between the Abbey’s strict adherences and the badly concealed heresies the whalers paid tribute to. Anything bearing the Abbey’s mark would be an intrusion. 

The building with Abbey crates outside is locked up too tightly to be anything but what he’s looking for. 

The locks are easy to bash open. He hasn’t seen a beast since he’d crossed the boundary from the Old Waterfront to the docks themselves, and the metal gives easily when he doesn’t need to worry about the noise. 

He and his companion slip in on quiet feet anyway. Caution, learned hard and well. 

The building is deserted, in any case. Only echoing tiled hallways and rotting offices. A lobby stripped of any comfort. Businesslike and perfunctory. Storerooms Corvo glances into and then passes back, leaving rows of beakers and alembics to gleam alone to themselves in their fur of dust. 

He’s looking for something. Some catharsis. The man is a ghost at his side, quiet, following where Corvo leads and not saying a word. 

The cells are at the back of the building, where what had been the winch for hauling in whale corpses had been removed to make room for them. A row of little rooms with numbers over the doors. 

Some doors hang open to empty rooms, chalkboards wiped clean, rows of surgical tools and empty vials standing eternally ready. Others he glances into and passes with a shudder. Little skeletons, and nothing more. 

The door of the one at the end is closed. There’s light coming under it, the bloody light of a setting sun. When Corvo listens at the crack there’s no footstep, no movement, but there’s some sound he doesn’t understand. A gurgling sound, a faint rattle. 

He rests his hand on his sword and eases the door open. 

It takes him far too long to realize what the pitiful little bundle of skin and bone and metal and glass on the gurney in the middle of this little cell is. 

It had been a human. It still is, Corvo thinks, _he_ still is, under the stitchwork and the pipes and the little wires and tubes. He’s still human. 

He's still alive. 

He drags in a breath that rattles and wheezes, the tubes down his throat holding his mouth open. There’s pinkish spit dried in crusts where they touch his lips, around his mouth and in rivulets down the ridge of his jaw. Breath wheezes back out of him, the motion of his chest rattling the wires and tubes strapped to his chest like a little forest. 

Corvo shuts the door behind him out of instinct more than any conscious thought. He can’t look away from the man on the gurney. 

The man’s eyes dart under his eyelids, the random flicker of true sleep. It’s possibly merciful. The man’s body is swollen with infection despite the atrophy, angry pink and red. Crusts of green-yellow pus build up thick and heavy around the places the tubes pierce his emaciated belly. 

There are tear tracks on his cheeks. Salt dried in white flakes on his cheekbones. Corvo clutches the edge of the gurney to keep his knees from going out from under him. 

“Alive,” his companion says, and it’s the first word either of them has said in hours, perhaps all day. It splits the silence open, and the nausea surges up even higher. “Somehow.” 

“This is wrong,” Corvo grits out, teeth clenched because he knows he’ll vomit if he lets himself think about this for more than a moment. This man, this poor man, deserves better than Corvo vomiting on him. 

“It is,” his companion murmurs, and there’s something in his tone that has Corvo rounding on him, staring at the bitter twist to his mouth. 

He hisses in shock when Corvo seizes his shoulders. 

“You know something,” he says desperately. “You know- I can't remember, I can't _remember_.” 

The man clutches at his arms and stares up at him for a long moment with that horrible blankness. It isn’t silent. The man behind them tortures out another ragged breath. 

“I can tell you a story,” his companion says at last. His voice rasps. 

“I want the _truth_ ,” Corvo snarls. 

He’s not angry at the man, doesn’t think he has it in himself to be angry at him. But he is so angry, angry and scared and so full of grief he can’t bear it. And there is no one else. There’s no one else in the whole benighted city except the two of them and the beasts. 

The man smiles and it’s unbearable. 

“It’s a true story,” he says. “In all the ways that matter.” 

“Fuck,” Corvo swears and lets go of him. “Shit,” and then, “Yes, fine, please. Tell me the story.” 

The man straightens his jacket a little. A compulsive movement. He’s always so still except when he seems like he can’t bear to be. 

“It was a marriage of perfect complements,” he murmurs, a rolling tone to his words. A story, a true story. “The Overseers and their abductions, the Academy and it’s glass and knives. And the City, with its endless supply of wretches and coin. Such an easy choice to make.” 

Corvo turns away from the man on the gurney. It’s easier to look at the walls, the board with its faded chalk diagrams, the barred window that looks out over befouled river. His chest aches. 

“They hunted the last leviathan and strung it up on hooks,” the man continues in a murmur. “And when they knew what they had done they were afraid. Humans are afraid of the dark, and there was nothing to hold back darkness without oil.” 

“Void,” Corvo chokes. 

“A madman came to them and promised them more oil,” the man continues. Low and rasping monotone. “They were afraid. They let him build false leviathans, and in doing so they sealed their fate. The sickness came as the last whale died.”

Corvo looks back at the man on the gurney. 

“Who is he?” he asks quietly. 

There’s silence for a time, stillness. The sound of the building decaying around them, the wind shaking the district outside. His companion steps over to the gurney at last. So blank, his face, but when he reaches out and cups the thin curve of the man’s neck his hands are gentle. There’s a thin tube and a needle inserted into the jugular vein just beside his palm. 

“Their greatest success,” he says. “A false leviathan.” 

Corvo moves to stand beside him. There’s a curious smell about this leviathan strapped to the gurney. Medical and sterile disinfectant, a little of the sweetness of infection, but under that something else. River water. 

He reaches out to touch a thin wrist. The pulse that flutters there is irregular and weak. 

“He's in no pain,” the man murmurs, tracing a fingernail over the curve of a tube, where it bends up and out from under the shivering ribcage. “They took that from him out of mercy. They considered it mercy.” 

“You _know?_ How?” Corvo demands. 

The man doesn’t look at him. 

“He's sleeping. He dreams about a garden.” 

He traces the curving tube over and over again.

“Mercy?” Corvo demands with acid in his mouth and the man shrugs, hand falling from the tube. Yellowish, viscous liquid pumps slowly through it. Syncopated pulses. A heartbeat. 

“They called it mercy,” the man says and his voice is a thread on the verge of snapping. “They took many things.” 

“I don’t understand,” Corvo says, and it feels like a lie somehow. He doesn’t understand. He doesn’t _want_ to understand. 

“The sun is setting,” the man says and he looks drawn, mouth pinched with exhaustion and something Corvo doesn't quite understand. The room is harsh with shadow, and the man’s starved face stands in stark relief. “Darkness is ready to fall.” 

The man looks at him, really looks at him, and Corvo realizes he never really could make out the color of his eyes. 

“You're sad,” he realizes. “You're, why are you sad?”

“There isn’t any more time,” the man whispers. “You need to make this choice. Please.” 

The man on the gurney makes a sound, a pitiful string of vowels slurred and broken around the tubes. He moves with it, a rattle of chains, and Corvo realizes as he turns to try to calm him that he’d been chained to the gurney. Steel cuffs lined in stained leather at his wrists and ankles. So skinny now that Corvo almost thinks he could slip the cuffs if he were lucid. 

He pushes greasy dark hair back from a forehead that burns with fever. It’s disgusting, but not more so than some of what Corvo’s seen, and the way the man calms at his touch eases some of the ache in Corvo’s chest. He’s still asleep, still dreaming. 

A hand on his arm, pale knobbly fingers and nails bitten down. 

“Be merciful,” the man says quietly.

**Author's Note:**

> save the whales


End file.
